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As I write this, roughly noon on 7/12, there were close to a thousand people signed up to play. I'm still liking the 3250 number that Richard Willey proposed for the number of entrants. With 3250 participants at an average price of $42 (the answer, right?), that's a cool $136K of gross revenue.

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I would ruff trick 1 and immediately play ♦AQ without playing any trumps. I expect West to cover. I ruff the ♦K and play ♥A. Hopefully all follow. Now I can play the ♦J, discarding a spade, and all follow, ruff a diamond setting up the long diamond, and crossruff spades and clubs. I have just enough trumps to do this.

Odds are not especially good as hearts split 2-1 78% of the time, plus you need ♦K on your left and 4-3 diamonds.

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I have to admit I would not play this as well. I would discard at trick 1, win the spade return, ruff the ♦7 immediately, ♥AK, ♠K, and trumps. So long as trumps are 3-2, I'll make on tripleton ♦Q, or either a squeeze or club finesse. This is probably not as good as other lines mentioned above but at least I won't get immediately set if West is 2=3 in the majors.

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Maybe someone with math skills can analyze. Scores for each session will most likely follow a normal distribution. No idea what the standard deviation would be. If it's about 10%, then only about 4.5% of scores will be 70% or higher. Getting four of those in a row will be very unlikely.

But a 65% game is 1.5 standard deviations and happens about 1 time in 7. Four in a row will happen .04% of the time, times 3250 players means about 1.3 people will get 65% for all four sessions.

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I'm interested to see what kind of score wins this thing. It took 75% to win the practice game with 10000 participants. For the real thing, it'll be four times as long with fewer players so regression to the mean is inevitable.

I like Richard's number of 3250 players for the real event, I would not take the over or the under on that one.

Richard and Paul ought to just bet a dollar. That way, only bragging rights are at stake. Just my opinion.

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The A-/B/C players in our unit love the bracketed RRs. Over the past few years the percentage of tables in these games versus all other has dramatically increased. The trend will continue, I think, with the tendency of these players to want to play others of their own skill level.

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At the table, since we don't play exclusion, I chose to bid 5♠, intending it as a bid as to how good his trumps were. This should have worked as partner has ♠AQTxx ♦A. We got to 7 down one. Not a bad spot, though.

One pair bid and made 7♠ when they played the ♠J from the problem hand, they played low smoothly, and “they didn't cover, they don't have it” played the ♠ dropping the singleton ♠K. My partner did not do that and went down.